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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Besides watching Flash videos (FLV files), you should have seen or played some Flash animation game as well (SWF files, a.k.a. Shockwave flash).

And most of the time, you received SWF Flash animation in Microsoft Office document. Very likely, the SWF animation file is embedded in Office Excel.
The reason of embedding SWF animation file in Office document is probably that majority of users is running on Windows / MS Office, and MS Office can serve as a container to run or play the SWF file.

(If you received an un-embedded SWF file, you might able to open and play the SWF animation in web browser that installed with Shockwave Flash add-on)

While the SWF flash appears as an embedded file in Office Excel or Word, you might want to extract or retrieve the embedded SWF flash for your blog.

However, there is no intrinsic or built-in function to extract / retrieve embedded SWF Flash animation from Microsoft Office document files. This is definitely true, that you won’t able to find this wanted feature in Office 2007 as well!

So, how could you do that in case you’re really wanted to do so? OK, here we go:

How to extract SWF Flash animation from Office Excel?

A simple VBA program (a.k.a Visual Basic for Applications) can extract the embedded SWF Flash animation file in less than a minute or so.

The VBA / guide has been tested in Office 2003 Professional, and it should be working perfectly in any Office versions / editions too (e.g. the latest Office 2007), provided the Office system has installed the VBA components.

Open a new Microsoft Excel document,

Click the Tools menu, Marco, Visual Basic Editor. You can also press the ALT+ F11 hotkey to bring up the VBA editor,

While in MS Visual Basic editor, click the View Code icon on the upper-left panel,

Copy the VBA program source code at below here and paste it onto the VBA source code editor,

Press F5 to execute the VBA source code,

An Open File dialog box prompts you to select the Office Excel document that embed the SWF Flash animation file,

A message box appears shortly after the Excel file is selected, with a message that says where the extracted SWF Flash animation file is saved in local hard disk!

The extracted SWF Flash animation file ended with SWF file extension, and it can be open/play in a web browser with Shockwave Flash addon (e.g. Flash9e.ocx in IE7).

The VBA source code used to extract or retrieve SWF Flash animation files that embedded in Microsoft Office Excel or Word:

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

First thing to do is to sign-up and get your Google AJAX API.
There is a very useful “Developer’s Guide” and samples of the codes to play around in the playground.

In this blog, I am using the tabbed version of Google Search and here is how I accomplish. (At the time of writing this post, content of the blog was carried from another domain that’s why Google hasn’t indexed the pages yet. So that search results will be empty for this blog for a while.)
There are 3 pieces of code, 1 for the header section of your HTML, 1 for the search box and 1 for the results area.
Code for the header section;

This piece of code has to be in the head section of your HTML before the “” tag.

// this is where you create your tabbed search results
// for every URL tab, you have to use the search address and the tab label
// This Blog
var searcher = new GwebSearch();
searcher.setSiteRestriction("http://www.lycie.com");
searcher.setUserDefinedLabel("Lycie");
searchControl.addSearcher(searcher);

// google also allow you to search the entire web
searcher = new GwebSearch();
searcher.setUserDefinedLabel("Web");
searchControl.addSearcher(searcher);

3. Creating the tabs for the search results. Whenever somebody search my blog, search results will be displayed in 3 tabs, Lycie – results from my site, Web – results from the web and All Blogs – Results from all the blogs on the web.

Here is how I do. For every URL tab you want to create use the code below.

This is where you limit your search results. In other word, you tell Google to display results only from this URL. Here I say, limit this tab’s results for this URL “http://www.lycie.com” and use the label “Lycie”

Limiting your results from an URL means, only results from that URL will be displayed in that tab. This is very useful if you have different sections on your site. Common usage for this is Forums and Galleries. If you have a forum on your site, most likely its URL is www.example.com/forums. By using the code below, you can create another tab just for results from your forums.

Google does not only allow URL restrictions. Google also allows you to search the entire web for videos, blogs, news, images, books and patents. Check the AJAX API’s Playground for more coding tips.
Code for the search box

Put this into your HTML wherever you want to show your search box.

<div id="searchControl">
Loading...</div>
Code for the search results

Put this into your HTML wherever you want to show your search results.